This Blog is a part of my media social experiment. Comments, suggestions and questions are welcome (vv.free.physics@gmail.com). For the specific lists of posts use links on the right. For consulting services of Education Advancement Professionals visit www.GoMars.xyz. Thank you for visiting, Dr. Valentin Voroshilov.

1. To be honest, the film was much better
(more informative and thought generating) than I expected. I though the bulk of
the film would be showing teachers complaining about how hard teaching is.
During the screening, I understood why did I have
that expectation – because lots of the news have been portraying teachers as
constantly complaining, refusing innovations, defending the status quo. I was
wrong in my expectations. I strongly recommend to watch this film, no matter
if you are a proponent or an opponent of charter schools, vouchers, or regular
public schools.

2. I am for public education. For me it is
not just about human rights, it is more. Destroying public
education puts at risk the intellectual health of the Country, greatly
lowers the competitiveness, makes the Country dependent upon the constant
import of the intellectuals (like it was when the U.S. was addicted to the
imported oil: http://www.GoMars.xyz/BD.html).

I follow the old-fashioned pragmatism. We need public
education today because of the same reasons the Country needed it when it
was created – for
having the best human capital in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital).

3. But we need GOOD public education. How
do we know it is NOT yet? There is a simple test for that. Ask people on the
streets: “Would you be OK if your kids were assigned to go to a randomly
selected public school?” (from any school, from across the state – assuming
no transportation issues). When 95 % people will say “Yes”, then public
education will be 100 % GOOD.

4. The film portrays public education as
being under attack. According to the film, the reasons for the attack are:
(1) commercialization of education (using schools for making money); (2)
religionization of education (using tax payers’ money for religious schools).
However, the film does not say that those attacks have become available and
have been successful because the proponents have had and still have a very
simple and clear line of attack on public education:“Public education does NOT work!”.

5. The film provides some data which are
positive for public schools: (1) test results are up; (2) graduation numbers
are up. But the opponents could say (1) tests have become easier; (2)
graduation requirements have become less restrictive. The conversation
goes into “he said – she said” mode. The film offers many emotional moments
for public education. But the opponents can (and already have, and will have
again) make a movie equally emotional to support their point (http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/the-shocking-state-of-our-schools).

Without commonly accepted data, public and
political decisions may be made on the basis – who screams louder.

I, for once, would like to know two
numbers; (1) what percentage of students had access to high quality education before creation
of charter schools in a given state; (2) what percentage of students have
access to high quality education after creation of
charter schools in that state.

There is, however, one questions I ask
myself every time when I teach an elementary physics course: “How come that so
many students, up to a quarter or sometimes even a third of the course, who
supposedly came from highly qualified teachers, struggle with simple algebra,
have a short attention span, demonstrate feeble reasoning abilities?” And the
most of the students in my courses are white, hence came supposedly from
relatively strong districts.

I have difficulty to believe that Bill
Gates or Oprah Winfrey are evil people thinking “I want to destroy public
education! I don’t’ want poor people to learn anything!”

I am sure that they, and many other
business people, truly
believe that public education does not work. And for this conversation
it does not matter if they are right or wrong about that. What matters is that the proponents of
public education have no strong strategy
to counterattack that perception!

For me it is very clear, that the broad
support of the idea of charter schools does not stem from the wish to destroy
public education; it stems from the positive appeal provided by charter school
proponents.

Charter school proponents come to businesses and talk to them using their
language: “You know public schools do not work for
you. Give as money – we will run the schools as good as you run your business,
and we will give you the results you want!”.

What do public school
proponents say?“Don’t’ touch our schools!
Go away!”

If you were a business owner searching
for good workers, who
would you turn to?

Finally, speaking about Bill Gates and
other billionaires trying to reform education; the biggest problem they have
(among many other) is how other people perceive them. For many people Bill
Gates (for example) is (a) a guru and they take his every word without any
doubt; or (b) a nice-to-hangout-with-celebrity; or (c) simple a "cash
cow" who is "always right" as long as he gives money. I would
like to ask Mr. Gates, how many times since his installation of his foundation,
after giving a speech he would heard back: "No, that's not gonna
work"? (an example of a conversation with a tech mogul).

7. The film revolves around money.

The main idea is transparent and can be
presented as a four-fold claim:

(B) Charter and voucher schools do not
serve a large population of students.

(C) For a large portion of students they
serve, charter and voucher schools do not provide education better than regular
public schools.

(D) Losing money leads to significant strain
put on regular public schools, which, in turn, leads to lowering the quality of
education.

In short, regular public schools
experience insufficient funding and charter schools and voucher schools make
the situation much worse by taking money away from public education.

The conclusion: vouchers should not be
used for religious schools, and charter schools have to be stripped off public
funds.

I would like to state again, that charter
school proponents always have an ace up a sleeve: “Public schools do not work
anyway, so, why even bother funding them?”

How do public school proponents fight
back?

“Your schools are also bad!”

or

“We didn’t have enough money in the first
place, and now because of you we have even less!”

So far, this line of defense has been successful
to curb the growth of the number of charter schools (at least in MA).

But if the overall quality of public education will
remain at the current level, the reason for attacking public education will
remain in place.

As a physics teacher, I know that a
pendulum always swings back.

Public opinion is such a pendulum. So far
it is generally on the side of public education.

But, if public schools proponents will not
offer a constructive, positive approach to advancing the overall quality of
public education, they may lose the battle for public support (in a 90-minute
film there was only one short positive example of a good work done by public
schools; it feels sometimes like in a public sector good teaching is a rare
exception; but if it was true, was public education even reparable?).

Insufficient funding is a real problem. But there is another, hidden,
problem, which has not been discussed in the film – it is an ineffective
funding.

As I often say to my students, let us use
the unique and the most powerful and most important human faculty –
imagination.

Let’s imagine that tomorrow all public funds would
remain only for the use by regular public schools.

What would they – schools – do differently?

How would this be different from the time twenty years
ago, when no charter or voucher schools existed?

What would public schools do to show
that there is NO need for charter or voucher schools at all?

Do you know the answers to
these questions?

I don’t’.

And the film does not answer
them, too.

The film does not even mention these
questions (maybe, it is
left for the next film).

8. Proponents of public
education, teachers, and first of all teacher unions have to make a transition from defending
having good education as a general right, to proposing specific pathways for
providing good public education for all.

If you have read up to this
place in the post, you may think that I am against charter schools or vouchers.

I am not.

I am against ineffective use of public
funds.

And I believe that proponents
of public education, teachers, and teacher unions also have to be against it.

That would not mean banning
vouchers.

That would mean banning any school which
uses public money from using vouchers for religious purpose.

That would not mean banning
charter schools.

That would mean banning any school which
uses public money from being removed from the state accountability system (no matter how good or bad that system
would be).

I believe that there is a
simple basic principle which should govern funding and managing policies in
education:
“Public funds = public rules”.

When I hear: “Charter schools
are publicly funded but privately run” I always want to ask the same question:
“And?”

I understand what “publicly
funded” means”; it means they use money coming from collecting taxes.

But the meaning of “privately run” depends on
what legislative bodies make it to mean.

If you watch the film very
closely, you see, that the real issue is not the money.

The real issue is the rules.

By some reason, which
completely escapes me, someone (who may have been afraid that charter schools
would not show good performance) some time ago made a claim that “money” = “rules. And
all people said:
“OK”.

And since then charter schools
and regular schools have been treated by different rules.

Why?

“They have to be privately
run”.

Well, I know a whole – huge –
industry which is also privately run, but follows very broad set of very strict
rules.

Do you?

How about food industry?

I do not know a single
federally or state run restaurant. And yet, any day, any time a government
agent – a health inspector – can enter the premises, check everything, and even
close it.

How about auto industry which
must follow regulations on safety, gas emissions?

How about aviation, cruse
traveling, hotels and hospitality, hospitals and clinics?

There is NO direct connection between
“money” and “rules”.

That type of connection is
placed by people (by people who write the rules, and by people who vote).

If the current set of rules
does not work for the good of the public, people need to and can change
it.

I believe, that the first
target, which all proponents of public education, teachers, and teacher unions
should aim at, is executing
one (the same)
accountability system for all types of
schools – as long as they use public funds.

“You are a parent. You want
your kid to go to a charter school. Fine. But how do you know that the school
is not “a lemon”? Don’t you want to know that your kid will really get
education better than in a regular school?”

“You are a businessman, you
want to give your money to a charter school. Fine. But how do you know that
your investment works for you? Don’t you want to compare that school’s work
with the work of a regular school?”

“If you do, you should agree
that all schools – even if they are run differently – have to be measured using
the same “rulers”, a.k.a. standards.”

The next target is the state
accountability system.

Unions have to stop saying:
“We want to ban high stake tests!”. That immediately gives the opponents a line
of the attack: “Teachers do not want to be accountable for their work; they
want our money, your money, but they do not want you to know how bad they are
at teaching!”

What unions need to start
saying is: “The current accountability system is awful; it is too expensive, it
takes too much time away from learning, it does not help kids to learn, and it
even does not provide any meaningful information! That is why we want to
replace it with a new system!”

By the way, this is one of the
answers to my question above:

What would public schools do to show
that there is NO need for charter or voucher schools at all?

They would take co-ownership in
developing, installing, executing, and advancing the state accountability
system, making it cheaper, more efficient, and more informative.

But the most important goal for all
proponents of public education, teachers, and teacher unions should be the quality of teacher corps.

But until then, the quality of
education is defined by the quality of teacher corps.

Every political decision,
every managing decision has to be probed by the question: “How does it help to improve the quality
of teacher corps?”

In this area, there is at
least one thing teacher unions can start doing relatively quickly, and at the
same time, start changing the game in the field of teacher professional
development.

The unions need to develop and
put in place a web-based mechanism for systematic collection from teachers the
information about various teacher professional development events they
attended, sharing that information, and ranking the events based on the quality
and usefulness of the events (immediately after the event, and later on, during
the school year).

About a year ago I sent to the
Massachusetts Department of Education a specific proposal related to the
structure of such a mechanism. It's actually would not be too complicated to do. First of all, every PDP provider would have been assigned an ID, and then teachers could have been leaving their systematized feedback on each PDP provider, and teachers could have search providers based on feedback and overall ranking. In the following phone call I was told that at
the time the Department had no plans on study and ranking hundreds of teacher
professional development providers (teaching needs
accountability, but teaching teachers doesn’t?).

There is an old Russian joke:
“Saving someone who is drowning is the duty of the one who is drowning” (it is
funnier in Russian). In this case it means, if teachers want to
be better prepared for their job (to be more successful, and to take away
from the opponents the reason for an attack), they need to start
forming the professional development system in the way it will really work for them.

9. The biggest obstacle for advancing public education is
not the
insufficient funding, it is not the
ineffective funding, it is even not the
indifferent system of teacher professional development. The biggest obstacle is
the current state of the discussion of the state of public education, which is stuck in a wrong
mode (that includes the film: http://www.GoMars.xyz/np.htm).

Framing the problem of the quality of
public education as
a “charter schools v. traditional schools” confrontation does not help for
finding the solution. This type of framing is based on the trivial model for
describing social progress, including in education, as a confrontation between
“free market” and “public good”. However, currently this conversation consumes
99 % of people and energy.

The working model should not treat “free
market” and “public good” as mutually exclusive, but rather as cooperative
entities.

I have gradually arrived to a vision that the old model of
reforming education does not work, but the new model does not exist yet;
the new model is the work in the progress and is being developed along the way,
on the go.

The screening of the film helped me to
crystallize some of my views on public education and how to go about making it
better.

To reform public education, first we need to reform
the way we reform it.

We have to make a transition from the
confrontation to consideration, to cooperation, collaboration, and to public
education rejuvenation.

10. Teachers in the form of teacher
unions have been fighting on many fronts. Probably, the strongest opposition
comes from the world of big business.

The way education system is managed and funded
is defined by policies placed in place by policymakers. We know that. We also
know that many policymakers are businessmen or influenced by those.
Unfortunately, there has been a long history of distrust between business community
and teacher unions (good reading: “The Teacher Wars” by Dana Goldstein, http://www.danagoldstein.com/thebook).
Many business leaders remember a disastrous attempt by Mark Zuckerberg to
change education in one city (Newark, NJ). He added his own $100,000,000.00 to
another hundred million dollars which came from other sources, and all that
money had essentially been lost (another good read: “The Prize” by Dale
Russakoff http://dalerussakoff.com/). Many blamed
the unions for not cooperating; the unions blamed the “reformers” for ignoring
them. However, without trying to bridge the differences and avoiding bringing
business leaders to the conversation table, efforts for reforming education
will be stuck in the fighting mode. Physics taught me that when two very strong
forces act in opposite directions, the result is usually close to zero; the forces just
cancel each other out.

Another pressure on teachers comes from
the field of higher education. One would think that since college and
university faculty are teachers, too, they would be mostly siding with teacher
unions. But, why would they? What stake do they have in supporting teachers?
Not many of them have children going into an inner city public school. On the
other hand, many of them are invited and hired by policymakers, think-tanks,
publishing companies, to helping with devising policies, materials, and
procedures for assessing teachers’ work.

So, I know that this joke does not sound
funny in English, but, speaking about teacher unions, it feels appropriate to
say again: “Saving someone who is drowning is the duty of the one who is
drowning”.

11. To Matt Damon.

(1) A huge thank to you – for everything.

(2) In “Promised Land” John Krasinski’s
character taught schoolers about the environment. Your passion is clean water.
But you also care about education. Maybe you would put them together? For
example, maybe you could produce and develop a short video about water, its
value and importance, about the work your charity does, and follow it with a
guide for teachers, with topics to discuss, questions, even assignments, to
fill one or two full lessons teachers could include in their science curriculum
(of course, if you have not done it yet already)?

Today they are children, but tomorrow they will govern
the world.

(3) The last thing I want to say might
sound wrong, but I will say it anyway.

Someone (Matt?) should tell the authors of
the movie – “Please, make a shorter version of the movie.”

I would say, no longer than 20 minutes. It
could be called “the highlights of the movie”, “the condensed version”, “the
elevator speech version”, or else. And it has to be free for download.

This is my reasoning.

I am sure that 99 % of the audience came
to the screening with already formed opinion, so people did not need to watch
the film to make their mind.

If the ultimate goal of the film is to
make people who have not given serious thoughts about the topics raised in the
film, starting to think about those topics, the authors need to make the film
watchable over a short lunch. Hopefully, after watching “the elevator speech
version”, people would dive into a discussion, and, maybe later, they would
watch the full version.

I would think that having a wide audience is more
important than having a friendly audience.

My #1 credential is the words of my
students. Most of my student feedback is good. But some is great, even
exceptional (simply because I know and love what I do). And I think that matters
(check this link www.GoMars.xyz/evvv.html).

My #2 credential is my experience. I
have been in the “trenches” for more than twenty years, teaching algebra,
geometry, trigonometry, calculus, logic, problem solving, and lately mostly
physics (http://gomars.xyz/phy.html).
The spectrum of my students spans from 5th - graders, all the way through
middle and high school students, to college and university students, students
with learning disabilities, and teachers. I also have professional experience
in the field of teacher professional development, done some writing and
consulting (a short, and a full version of my resume: www.GoMars.xyz/vv.htm).

My professional experience has led to
formation of unorthodox views on teaching, teacher professional development,
management in education. As you can see from this publication, things I believe
in are often perpendicular (but not opposite) to many mainstream ideas.

Please, feel free to reach out to me if
you have any questions, suggestions, ideas.